ABSTRACT
This chapter describes research focusing on the design, development, prototyping, and evaluation of changes to the interface and interaction routines that weapons directors experience as they manage military air traffic in peacetime and during conditions of high threat, short time, and surprise. It presents a conventional task analysis via weapons direction handbooks and airborne warning and command systems manuals supplemented with insight from domain experts. The interviews, doctrine, scenarios and IDEF diagrams all provided insight into the nature of weapons direction. The chapter describes the experimental design and hypotheses and the experimental testbed, and discusses a more detailed descriptions of the two system interfaces, the experimental procedures, and the dependent measures. Measures were developed to assess five cognitive processes: attention, workload, memory, situation assessment (in terms of judgments about future events, not awareness of the current situation), and decision making.
